1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a distributed capture system and more particularly to an improved distributed capture system which enables digital content to be captured in various formats and interfaced with a plurality of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platforms which enables the distributed capture system to be seamlessly integrated with a customer's legacy ECM system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Distributed capture systems are known in the art. Such distributed capture systems are widely used by financial institutions for electronically processing checks in the aftermath of the so called Check 21 legislation. More particularly, the Check 21 legislation, i.e. the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, Public Law 108-100, effective Oct. 28, 2004, allows the recipient of the original paper check, for example, a financial institution, to create a digital version of the original check, called a substitute check, and process the substitute check electronically. As such, the need for further handling of the physical document and transport of the physical document by couriers is eliminated.
Such distributed capture systems are known in the art and include systems for automatically feeding checks and scanning the checks to create an electronic image of the check. The electronic image of the check may be encrypted and transmitted to a central location or processed in the “back office”. Examples of such distributed processing systems are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,910,988 and 6,032,137, hereby incorporated by reference.
The check images are stored on a database for processing and archival purposes. The databases used for storing the check images as well as systems for accessing the databases are known as Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. Financial institutions utilize such ECM systems to store check images as well as other bank records, such as signature cards and loan applications and other bank records including customer deposit and withdrawal slips, created at the financial institution (hereinafter “financial records”) in electronic form.
Examples of such ECM systems are disclosed U.S. Patent Application Publication Nos.: U.S. 2009/0106276 A1; U.S. 2009/0106271 A1; U.S. 2009/0006422 A1; U.S. 2008/0295101 A1; U.S. 2008/0219577 A1; U.S. 2008/0201636 A1; U.S. 2008/0177790 A1; U.S. 2008/0098455 A1; U.S. 2008/0091761 A1; U.S. 2007/0260619 A1; U.S. 2007/0214177 A1; U.S. 2007/0174281 A1; U.S. 2007/0162400 A1; U.S. 2006/0106706 A1; U.S. 2005/0246311 A1; U.S. 2004/0249786 A1; as well as U.S. Pat. No. 7,213,022, all hereby incorporated by reference.
It is known that existing electronic platforms, currently available at financial institutions for scanning and processing checks, are not suitable for processing financial records. More specifically, after the Check 21 legislation was adopted, financial institutions with multiple branch locations would courier checks to a central location for imaging, processing and storage. In order to eliminate the need for couriering the checks to central locations, branch solutions were developed. These branch solutions included check scanners for scanning checks and transmitting electronic images to a central location for processing and storage in an ECM.
Because of the differences in the formats between checks and other financial records, legacy systems for scanning checks are not suitable for scanning other financial records. As such, some financial institutions with multiple branches are still in a position in which financial records need to be couriered to a central location and scanned and converted to electronic form in order to be stored in the financial institution's legacy ECM. In order to store the electronic images of the financial records, the financial records also needed to be categorized and identified for storage and later retrieval in the financial institution's legacy ECM.
More specifically, checks are all encoded with magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) data. Such MICR data is located in relatively the same position on all checks; i.e along the bottom of the check. The MICR data includes various information including; the bank number, the account number and the check number. After presentment the check is encoded with the amount of the check. When a check is scanned and converted to an electronic image, the MICR data can be read by a conventional by an optical character recognition (OCR) system. Since the MICR data is in a uniform format and located in the same location on all checks, conventional OCR systems can be use to extract data from the checks for archival in a database along with an image of the check. A system for imaging checks and archiving the MICR data in a database along with an image of a check is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,654,487, hereby incorporated by reference.
Financial records, on the other hand, are quite different than checks. More specifically, financial records exist in different file formats and different size documents and contain personalized data in many different areas on the documents. Thus legacy systems at the branches for scanning checks and converting checks to electronic form for storage on the financial institution's legacy ECM are not suitable for such financial records. As such, financial institutions were known to courier financial records to a central location where the financial records were scanned and entered into a legacy ECM. In addition, data from the financial records was known to be manually extracted from the financial records and entered into the financial institution's legacy ECM.
In order to obviate the need for couriering such financial records to central locations for scanning and manually processing such financial records, systems were developed for enabling such financial records to be converted to electronic form without the need for the documents to be scanned. An example of such a system was developed by Wausau Financial Systems under the trade name eCaptureXpress® (“the Wausau system”). As will be discussed in more detail below, the Wausau system is configured to convert documents in various formats, such as Windows®, Portable Document Format (PDF) and other formats into a Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). Systems for converting documents to a TIFF format are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,672,212 and 6,995,853. The TIFF format includes an image of the document and embedded text. The print stream of the embedded text is compared with a document classification template for automatically classifying and indexing the document for storage and archival purposes.
Many financial records that are created at the financial institution other than checks need to scanned and archived. Such financial records cannot be scanned by legacy back office systems used for transporting and archiving checks. As such, such financial records are known to be sent by a courier to a central location for scanning. These documents are scanned and archived in the financial institution's legacy ECM. Normally, metadata regarding such financial records is manually entered; a cumbersome and time consuming task. In order to automate the process for such financial records, Distributed Capture. Systems with integrated ECMs have been developed for automatically classifying and indexing such financial records. Unfortunately, such distributed capture systems are integrated with a particular ECM platform. These ECMs are sold under various trade names including: OnBase, OpenText, FileNet and Documentum.
Unfortunately, the data format for the various ECM systems varies. Thus, in order for a financial institution to implement a system for imaging and electronically archiving financial records, the financial institution has to acquire a distributed capture system for such financial records that has the same ECM platform as the financial institution's legacy ECM, if it is available. Alternatively, the financial institution has to convert its existing record data to a format compatible with the native ECM platform. Database data conversion is not known to be 100% accurate. As such, much if not all of the data that has been converted from the legacy format to the native format is known to be manually checked. Aside from being expensive, converting from a legacy ECM platform to a new ECM platform is cumbersome and time consuming.
Thus, there is a need for providing a distributed capture system for imaging and archiving financial records that does not require conversion of existing financial record data from a format required by a legacy ECM to a new format compatible with a new ECM.